3 ms·

Sigh. I bet every cryptographer in the world, other than Bruce Schneier and Ron Rivest, hears that all the damn time. No wonder so few of them ever release an

Sigh. I bet every cryptographer in the world, other than Bruce Schneier and Ron Rivest, hears that all the damn time. No wonder so few of them ever release any code.

sp332 15y ago
They hear it because it's really, really hard to do good crypto. As a rather impressive example, nearly all of the submissions to the NIST's SHA-3 hash competition have holes in them. https://ehash.iaik.tugraz.at/wiki/The_SHA-3_Zoo https://ehash.iaik.tugraz.at/wiki/The_SHA-3_Zoo These are big names and serious, multi-year projects, and they still fail. Bruce Schneier's "skein" hash is one of the few that haven't been cracked (yet).
- marshray 15y ago
  Yes, and Rivest's MD-6 dropped out at the first round and DJ Bernstein's (HINT HINT) CubeHash algorithm on the second round of the SHA-3 competition. But if you don't see the difference between inventing a new cryptographic hash function to improve on SHA-2 and what OpenDNS is doing with DNS then you ought not pass judgment on everyone who attempts to add some useful security where there is none at all now.
  - tptacek 15y ago
    Actually, Daniel Bernstein is far more likely to come up with a new secure hash core that withstands real world attacks than anyone is to come up with a new crypto protocol that will survive adversaries. TLS had the best peer review any publicly known crypto system ever got, and it's been a litany of failures.
    - marshray 15y ago
      But this DNSCrypt proposal is specifically claiming to be a "slight variation" on DJB's DNSCurve protocol and curve25519. It uses his NaCl library for implementation too. But looking at the DNSCrypt code on github, there's no indication of who actually wrote it. It has no attribution, no source code comments. Haven't found a protocol document either. The author(s) were certainly meticulous though. The #includes are categorized according to their standardization origin (posix, C, internal) and alphabetized within those categories.
      - tptacek 15y ago
        I'm not actually sticking up for DNSCrypt; they reached out to me awhile ago but I kind of stiffed them for review time --- it's been an especially busy month.
        marshray 15y ago
        Yeah. I'm not one thing or another on it yet either. It's just kind of like a spaceship lands from planet OpenDNS and a CDROM rolled out containing the source for a new OpenBSD daemon (without the horns). And you may be right about (DJB circa 2011) developing a new secure hash function more reliably than a new protocol if you take away the requirement that it also perform significantly better than SHA-2.
tptacek 15y ago
Marsh, that was the biggest warm fuzzy you could have given me. Thanks!

Sigh. I bet every cryptographer in the world, other than Bruce Schneier and Ron Rivest, hears that all the damn time. No wonder so few of them ever release any code.

sp332 15y ago

They hear it because it's really, really hard to do good crypto. As a rather impressive example, nearly all of the submissions to the NIST's SHA-3 hash competition have holes in them. https://ehash.iaik.tugraz.at/wiki/The_SHA-3_Zoo https://ehash.iaik.tugraz.at/wiki/The_SHA-3_Zoo These are big names and serious, multi-year projects, and they still fail. Bruce Schneier's "skein" hash is one of the few that haven't been cracked (yet).

marshray 15y ago
Yes, and Rivest's MD-6 dropped out at the first round and DJ Bernstein's (HINT HINT) CubeHash algorithm on the second round of the SHA-3 competition. But if you don't see the difference between inventing a new cryptographic hash function to improve on SHA-2 and what OpenDNS is doing with DNS then you ought not pass judgment on everyone who attempts to add some useful security where there is none at all now.
- tptacek 15y ago
  Actually, Daniel Bernstein is far more likely to come up with a new secure hash core that withstands real world attacks than anyone is to come up with a new crypto protocol that will survive adversaries. TLS had the best peer review any publicly known crypto system ever got, and it's been a litany of failures.
  - marshray 15y ago
    But this DNSCrypt proposal is specifically claiming to be a "slight variation" on DJB's DNSCurve protocol and curve25519. It uses his NaCl library for implementation too. But looking at the DNSCrypt code on github, there's no indication of who actually wrote it. It has no attribution, no source code comments. Haven't found a protocol document either. The author(s) were certainly meticulous though. The #includes are categorized according to their standardization origin (posix, C, internal) and alphabetized within those categories.
    - tptacek 15y ago
      I'm not actually sticking up for DNSCrypt; they reached out to me awhile ago but I kind of stiffed them for review time --- it's been an especially busy month.
      - marshray 15y ago
        Yeah. I'm not one thing or another on it yet either. It's just kind of like a spaceship lands from planet OpenDNS and a CDROM rolled out containing the source for a new OpenBSD daemon (without the horns). And you may be right about (DJB circa 2011) developing a new secure hash function more reliably than a new protocol if you take away the requirement that it also perform significantly better than SHA-2.

tptacek 15y ago

Marsh, that was the biggest warm fuzzy you could have given me. Thanks!